Re: Kudos and beer

Re: Would love

Or just try playing "Defender" at all...

I still love it, far more than anything since. It wants your money, not your time, so its bastard hard. I'm not even that good, 20k is about my maximum, but that won't stop me hacking a £3 keyboard to make another "proper" controls board.

The history of Defender is quite interesting, a solo programmer, eight or nine buttons, it was nearly chucked out for being too complex.

Re: If you have an old DAB,

Actually it is a little more complicated than that, and more interesting...

DAB runs at 1.6Mbps for the whole "ensemble", if it used a single high data rate carrier, the echoes or multipath signals would collide with unrelated signal, destroying the data.

Instead it uses COFDM, where the spectrum is split into 1536 separate carriers all modulated at a much lower rate, much like keying out morse on every note of a piano. The integration time for each channel then allows for long echoes, the delayed signal is still "on the same bit" as the direct signal - as long as the echo is less than 60km or so, and beyond that it is simply weak.

Re: bonkers

You detail well the evils that are in this criminal supply chain, and we can agree that they are not desirable. I don't take the point that Silk Road supplies just to the local dealer, it supplies to the end-user as far as I am aware, through anonymity and smallness of quantity. Larger quantities through the post offer no reduction of risk to the local dealer, so he would be better off buying from his existing sources.

It's early days yet, and Silk road does allow one to buy direct from a cheerful peasant, though like eBay, it might be a while till this develops the critical mass it needs. I don't see any point in going back through 50 years of history to understand a phenomenon that is at most 5 years old, and still in development.

I was rather making the point that drug use is a personal moral standpoint, as is prohibition, and historically - if you wish - prohibition tends to lose out, witness alcohol, prostitution, homosexuality, race inequality, weed...

Silk road sounds to me like a perfect antidote to all the evils of a criminal supply chain.

People are always going to take illicit substances, it is the single unifying factor of all human cultures ancient and present. Therefore why not let them, in small quantities, do what they like? It's a "consenting adults in private" argument.

Are the authorities worried that this new phenomenon could achieve most of the goals of their 30-year war, but at no cost to the taxpayer?

This moral authority thing, being able to tell others what they can and cannot do according to one's own moral judgement, its a pernicious little bugger isn't it?

Re: Why change the system?

I've worked on Tetra handsets, its a good standard, does all the weird stuff the emergency services want, like mini basestations, walkie-talkie etc. Given that it was replacing analogue narrowband comms it had to use a very narrow bandwidth, so would never do video streaming. Tetra+ was an attempt to increase BW by using fancy 64QAM (or somesuch), but was never really going to work outside the lab.

So why not simply couple it to a GSM/3G/4G whatever phone, which duplicates the comms both for archiving and for diversity (fail-over to non-Tetra) - and allows SMS and multimedia when available.

Indeed, why not use 2 batteries 2 mics 2 speakers, like sellotaping together a Nokia and an existing Tetra handset.

Re: Silly Question #1

erm, Silly Question number two,

what the fuck are GCHQ doing getting involved in what the daily mail thinks the politicians should be telling consenting adults in private what they should and should not do? It's a public health concern, not a national security issue.

why bother with the drugs trial at all?

If they have evidence of planned murder, surely this is a more important charge to press against him? Certainly my concept of what the police are there to do, would be to sort out murderers first, and facilitators of drug sales, erm about four hundred and thirty second.

take a look at the originals

Godel's provability theorem can possibly lead to a test as to whether the mind is quantum, but it is one approach only, and based on nothing but abstract argument.

The 1998 paper from Penrose and Hameroff had some real physical mechanisms and predictions in there*. What I liked best about Penrose is that he starts by acknowledging that the brain "behaves like" a quantum computer, leading to the suspicion that it might be...

I can't possibly do justice to the material starred below, in this post, so I just recommend a look for those interested. I'll leave you with a recent quote from Hameroff

After 20 years of skeptical criticism, "the evidence now clearly supports Orch OR," continue Hameroff and Penrose. "Our new paper updates the evidence, clarifies Orch OR quantum bits, or "qubits," as helical pathways in microtubule lattices, rebuts critics, and reviews 20 testable predictions of Orch OR published in 1998 – of these, six are confirmed and none refuted.

Re: Defender!

Re: Pretty nasty

I've just gone through this whole process with a "clone" device, from a reputable supplier.

Firstly, I don't see how it is illegal to "white room" copy an existing part, like the very popular FTD232, if the chinese or whoever have replicated the function without copying the silicon, then, isn't that what AMD did to Intel, legitimately? This chip is the new "MAX232" - of course it will be replicated.

Incidentally I hugely respect FTDI - have a look at their new "Eve" concept, turns a dumb graphics display into a sort of HTML terminal, so small micro's can drive big displays without tons of gfx and fonts type of codebase.

Secondly, I'm not sure the new FTDI driver actually writes zero into the PID of the clone parts, I think they come with zero as the PID, but I could be wrong. My understanding is that the new drivers will recognise only parts with VID=0403 and PID = 6001, 6010, 6011. It will "fail to install properly" -because it has not been explicitly instructed to work with "0000" parts.

I would post some of the code from the *.inf files, but the T's and C's are highly restrictive. In fact it is the agreement you sign up to when installing the drivers that carries most of the poison, you are not allowed to modify the software in any way, etc etc.

I can understand they don't want their efforts in making and maintaining the drivers to benefit their competitors, but they're protecting a carcass, there's no more meat on the USB-UART thing, best move on, and btw everyone's coming round to this open-source thing these days.

incorrect value in register

Sorry Team Reg, I am a loyal and long-standing reader and commentard and I admire much of your irreverent humour. However, I can't get on with sniggering references to "pussy". Its a schoolboy thing born of fear and bravado, and to me at least, screams immaturity.

Re: What IS the physics then?

Before launching into the Physics, how can I upvote the strapline?

How many .. to change a light bulb, I LOVE it.

As is mentioned above, blue light needs more energy per photon. GaAs was used for red LEDs originally, and alloying it with Indium and Gallium in various ratios causes the bandgap of teh material to increase and therefore we can reach yellow then yellow/green, and these days, pure green - of the sort one can hold in one's own mortal hand.

For Blue we need to find a material with more bandgap than GaAs, InGaAs, InGaAsP, InGaAlAsP and all that lot - you can see that the choice of material variants has grown, testament to the work that has been put into this market.

GaN and SiC are both contenders, early blue LEDs used SiC but the brightness is limited, it is an indirect band-gap material - a phonon is needed to carry away some excess momentum when the photon is emitted, reducing the probability of emission and wasting some energy.

Both SiC and GaN are exceedingly hard to grow in pure form, being riddled with screw dislocations, threading dislocations, foreign atom inclusions and many more nastys. GaN is the worst, we need defects per cm2 of a few hundred, typical bulk materials have 10^6 to 10^9.

To solve this we need to grow thin layers on a substrate that we can make decent crystals of, like sapphire (Al2O3) or SiC or even GaAs. The substrate order will force the thin layer to be defect-free. Unfortunately all the substrates have a different lattice constant, the mismatch needs to be accommodated somehow through interposing layers.

It is in this area where the Nobel Laureates excelled, Akasaki and Amano used sapphire with a buffer layer of AlN, whilst Nakamura found a way to grow GaN starting at low temperature then increasing the deposition temperature, spreading the strain across some distance.

It is all to do with the temperatures and gas compositions, including different dopants - and finally the sequencing to build crystalline thin layers that can cool down from the forming temperature (800-1400'C) to room temperature without shattering.

Since then there have been many more developments, like quantum dots, plasmonic resonators - and all sorts of means to get the light out of the crystal, but these are not part of the prize-winning research.

Re: Speculation

It's bloody hard to make quality sapphire in these sorts of quantities, if you look at today's prices the screens would cost well over $100. GT were banking on getting lots of things working all at once - jumping from 90kg "boules" to 180kg. Growing the crystals in the preferred "c" axis so that regular longitudinal slices can be used, like in silicon - rather than having to saw it into planks like a tree. I'm sure they will get there, but not while being kicked all the way down the road. Chapter 11 might do them a lot of good, I hope they make it work because super-quality LED's and plenty of other stuff relies on high quality sapphire substrates.

Re: Figures

Remember all the user data that Redmond said went into crafting the Office Ribbon UI? Where do you suppose it came from?

I thought they'd plucked it out of their arses. Seriously.

Word and Excel were excellent programs till the ribbon, an exemplary implementation of Pink Floyd's "I've got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from"

For neo-luddites wanting the authentic 2003 functionality, there is a lovely new toolbar you can install, called Ubitmenu - which looks like another ribbon tab but its all you need. It's free for domestic use and about a fiver otherwise, and as usual be careful on the install as you won't want any other crap they might try and install with it.

chapter and verse

I didn't get much of a handle on the case from the brief article. Here for all is the core of the judgement:

U.S. Patent No. RE37,802 "deals with the field of multiple access communications using spread spectrum modulation," according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Wi- Lan claimed in a 2011 lawsuit that Apple infringed on its '802 patent "by using certain industry standards in the field of wireless technology."

A jury found in October 2013 that Apple was not infringing and that claims 1 and 10 of Wi-Lan's patent are invalid. The patent has 40 total claims.

U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap vacated part of that unanimous verdict Thursday, saying the invalidity finding was not based on enough evidence.

"The court is unable to find that the jury's finding as to invalidity of claims 1 and 10 of the '802 patent is supported by substantial evidence," Gilstrap wrote. "Accordingly, the jury's invalidity verdict cannot stand."

Apple needed "to prove invalidity by clear and convincing evidence" but "no evidence was presented of complex multipliers in the prior art," the 16-page opinion states.

Claim one of Wi-Lan's patent describes "a transceiver for transmitting a first stream of data symbols," and claim 10 explains "means for receiving a sequence of modulated data symbols."

Though Gilstrap vacated the judgment as to the validity of claims 1 and 10, he denied all other aspects of Wi- Lan's motion for judgment as a matter of law.

The actual patent is very interesting, to me it looks like a reasonable invention. However, it is in fact a 1998 submission that attempts to claim a 1992 priority date, and in true submarine fashion, only surfaced in 2002. Of course by this time similar developments of comms theory were already in operation and included within international standards. Whether these "working" systems actually use the means described, whether these means actually work in practice, or whether better methods have been found, I don't know. I'll have a look if there is some interest. It would be a good case to look at.

Re: Everything is an innuendo

Re: ... so the same as the Electrolux Trilobite then...

Dyson Airblade hand-dryer

Sounds better in a Glaswegian accent

"how's the earbleed technology getting on"

seriously I've never heard anything quite as loud, especially in the high frequencies, its easy for the hands to operate as whistles well into the 10's of kHz. It sounds to me a lot more damaging than the live performance SPL limits.

It's serious Jim...

I've had a fair bit to do with "infotainment" systems. The vehicle manufacturers don't really get hackability, even simple measures like reducing the attack surface are rejected in favour of functionality. One project demanded compatibility with over 60 varieties of photo/AV/container formats. Another response is simply "what can they do with it anyway", as though it would stop at mere annoyance. If there is a way to hack into the system there will be ways to monetise it, we just haven't seen them yet, though I could suggest ransomware, bogus service demands, premium phone services, contagion into connected smartphones, just as a kick-off.

In other news...

The entire UK population's stolen "medical records" are being offered for sale.‬ The management team of the rebranded National Health and Information Service has confirmed the theft of files and warned that neither the purchase nor publication of the documents would provoke a criminal complaint or a lawsuit.

why do DJ's use twitter?

Re: Edward Snowden?

Let us not forget the inherent security flaws that were built-in to the said protocols to facilitate access for the g-men, like the NSA "random number generator" - Dual_EC_DRBG.

Nor the fact that compromised encryption has been the only sort allowed for many years, and it is only a matter of time before the exploits become known first to the crims, then to the public cryptology community. (look at SAT solvers..)

~The fundamental issue centres around what citizens are permitted to do, and thus the effort needed to police them, and thus the degree of compromise built into their privacy.

We are not allowed to interfere with the governments and corporations through any sort of meaningful protest, instead we must watch the globalisation of, for instance, medicine (astra-zeneca-smithkline-beecham-etc-etc), the unbelievable abuse that is PFI, and too much more.

Legitimate contempt and protest must be suppressed or big money gets upset.

Re: Give us your ideas, too

Re: Timescale

Yes its a weird one this, I had to go and check the numbers - I was going to suggest that "time-of-flight" was where the other billions of years had gone, that's the normal answer to the very-old-stars-observed question.

Not in this case however, this star is only a few thousand light-years away, right next door on these billion light-year scales.

I wonder if it must be from an unusually sparse region of the universe that has not seen much if any star formation. Perhaps only relatively recently (in the last billion years) did this one have the mass to collapse into a star, accretion can be very slow if the primordial gas is thin enough. Is it a dinosaur born late?

The paper covers some more interesting theories, suggesting that all its neighbours must have self-immolated into black holes carrying all their iron etc with them - though normally even in the "full collapse" scenario a load of metals get spewed into space. The "gentle supernova" they propose sounds unlikely, even if it does then solve the Lithium problem.

redundancy

That's a plus point, the multiple motors can suffer failure much like a RAID drive. Obviously you would need to double-up (or more) the battery and control systems, but that doesn't add much cost, the batteries are still the same volume/power, just split across 3 or 4 supplies. Making it safe with 75% or even 66% of lift is reasonable. I'll bet they're Switched Reluctance motors, huge power and speed and only one moving part, a funny-shaped lump of iron. Absolute bastards to control though, as I'm finding out...

Re: Are you sure?

I don't know what aspect of H+S your audiologist was referring to, here are a couple of facts:

H+S understands all about safe voltages, the SELV (safety extra low voltage) specification allows voltages up to 70V absolute max to be put onto touchable connectors, this is known to be safe.

Supplying mains power adapters to members of the public requires that they are EC marked, which in turn requires they are tested against a proof voltage of several kV, they conform to EMC requirements, they don't overheat and (i think) they are fused or in some way protected against overdissipation.

PAT testing is used in addition to this if the parts are to be used at a given premises - a school or factory or office - and checks that each of the relevant type-approved items is not faulty.

I suspect it is this requirement that stops them offering you your power supply. If I were them I would ensure it uses a standard micro-USB then it can be your responsibility to source and use the adapter.

Re: I'm Curious

I don't get it, the FM band is a worldwide simple standard. They can't easily sell it off because it would still want to be used for sporting events etc. In any case the bandwidth is small, only 20MHz all-told, and the useability is not good, you are reckoned to be able to use 1/15th for big transmitters (i.e. national networks), the figure for little low-power users cannot easily get below 1/4 due to the 4-colour theorem.

So, in all, maybe 5MHz of bandwidth in any given place. Get Tim Worstall onto it, he will agree that there is no exploitable resource here.

The DAB bandwidth, on the other hand is 174MHz-239MHz, or 65MHz, over three times as much. We currently use just seven of the available 40 bands, in London, broadcasting about 80 stations. I can't see us ever needing much more than this, if you really can't get enough christian thrash metal genre, then get a computer, or a life.

So, they could sell the DAB band, or half of it, for more money, it doesn't need such a long antenna, half what the FM band needs, but I can't think of a use for the bandwidth, given that there is "white space" radio spectrum coming along that allows all users to use what they like within reason and license-free. There will be no market at all for odd bits and pieces of RF-bandwidth when this comes in.

Don't bash DAB, it is a really good system, its hugely efficient in BW terms, allowing a national network using only one frequency and greatly reduced megawatts, it just needs more time. Also, sure, really don't abolish FM, there is no need to and no benefit forthcoming from it.

QMS

Me too,

mass-spectrometers no longer have a huge magnet and a curved vacuum path, look up "quadrupole mass spectrometer" - no that's not four of them, its a clever oscillating field where only the particles that are neither too heavy nor too light (for their charge) are the only ones that stay on the beam line. They're about the size of a KT66 thermionic valve (tube).